Alan2005

Really? I found mine under a hedge like a normal person.

Shard

Hallelujah !

Thanks for your views.

Greenhill

It was a five-a-day habit.

Could only be funded with both a paper round and a milk round

BristolUK

What about the Judean People's Front?

Novocastrian

Did you do that on purpose? It's either quite clever or the misspelling of the young year so far.

JamesM

You mean the People's Front of Judea???

MikeUK

It's a bit of a steal ... not realy my own work

Oakvillian

Really? I mean, do you really, truly think that a study of a couple of dozen five- and six-year olds (many of whom presumably believe wholeheartedly in the Tooth Fairy and Sanata Claus and so on) is a sensible way to correlate religious upbringing with reality-perception difficulties? What a crock of shit. If I was those "researchers"' supervisor I'd have invited them to take a C- and see the teacher after class.

ExKiwilass

oops, touched someone's nerve

Oakvillian

Not at all. My kids have almost no exposure to religion - I have no horse in this race. I have just skim-read the study on which this is based (it's available here http://www.researchgate.net/profile/...ication_detail) and I still think it's a deeply flawed study. Apart from the extraordinarily small sample sizes (16 children in one category) there are a whole load of influences on a child's perception of reality, beyond religious instruction at home or in school. Literature in the home would be a good place to start. Attitudes of parents and schoolteachers towards inquisitive children would be another. And while there's no doubt the latter is influenced by the attitude towards religious texts by the parents or schoolteachers, or friends/neighbours/peers, in the study it is treated as a binary system: either you're religious (in fact, Catholic Christian, as all other religious affiliations were filtered out of the study group) and all bible stories are treated as factual accounts, or you're not religious and everything in the bible is a fantasy.

Add that to the rather badly written editorial on the Liberty Voice website, and it's a study I wouldn't give houseroom to.

Oink

I absolutely agree, complete bollocks. The fact that it was published suggests to me that an untenured instructor has put their name to a couple of graduate students sorry excuse for research without bothering to read it. It might have made some sense as a case study but one that should not have made any general correlative claims. It'd be interesting to see if they've presented this stuff anywhere.

ExKiwilass

http://www.bu.edu/learninglab/files/...s-in-press.pdf

it was 66 kids involved, not a a few dozen.

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-28537149

Shard

Oops, I hadn't read the article before I commented, thinking it was the same as an article I read on another thread. Having said that, and read the article now, I don't see a problem and stand by my original remark.

I think you might be throwing the baby with the bathwater on this one. Perhaps the research is not as reliable as you (or Oink) would like, but it doesn't seem counter intuitive, does it. Anyone with kids knows exactly how malleable their minds are at infant age, and establishing infeasible doctrine is bound to have knock on effects. Further research will no doubt provide further evidence.

Oink

Its still nowhere near enough to make such claims. The sample size would need to be well over a 1000 and even then I wouldn't have much confidence in the generalizability. Its just typical shoddy and weak research that gets pumped out in 100s of depts of education because the grad students are not trained well enough. Because firstly, there is not enough rigour expected from them and secondly, most faculty members themselves not have the depth of knowledge in research methodology as most are ex-school teachers. They should simply train teachers and counsellors and such and leave the research to other depts.

Shard

Why 1000? And why would you remain sceptical?